That Time I Went to Zambales to Teach Souvenir Making

I got invited to teach some peeps in Zambales, how to make souvenir items out of bamboo back in 2015.

The workshop participants are indigenous peoples from all over their province.  They've got traditional folk crafts like bamboo pipes, bird calls, whistles, flutes, bows and arrows, but they also wanted to produce souvenir items like key chains, refrigerator magnets and the like.

Traditional bamboo crafts from Zambales. Image taken from https://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/pinay-solo-backpacker/jungle-survival-pamulaklakin-forest-trail-075027297.html

Yours truly cooperated with Ms. Jaravata of DTI Zambales. It was a two day seminar on bamboo processing, with really awesome results.

I'm sharing some pics here:

Earrings by Ms. Jaravata.

Some bangles in the foreground.

Pen holders styled like mugs.

Refrigerator magnets!

More pen holders.

Assorted cuts and some letter openers at the upper left hand side of the photo.

They even exhibited some works in Likha ng Central Luzon 2015, which I failed to take pictures of. Sad :(

I'll be going back to Zambales soon, and hopefully more fresh stuff to post too!

Procuring Bamboo in Santa Ignacia

Some weeks back, we were looking for a supplier of bamboo poles.

The long and winding road!

You see, the family business processes these raw materials and turns them into handicrafts, of course with the help of local craftsmen.

From pieces for burning, to pretty pieces for home and office.

Typically, these things are made into place mats, fencing materials, a variety of native baskets like the bakke and bilao.  I've heard some years back that there's a guy somewhere in town who still makes tiklis (in Ilocano; in Tagalog they're known as kaing) baskets.

A bilao with lumpia wrappers. Image found in http://www.marketmanila.com/archives/marketmans-quest-for-the-thinnest-lumpia-wrappers

The sad truth is that it's a fading tradition.  The government has made efforts to address the revival of folk crafts in the form of livelihood training seminars. One example is that conducted in the neighboring town of Mayantoc some years ago by the Department of Trade and Industry Tarlac.

There's a guy somewhere in town who used to make place mats for us.

Place mats sold by Woodinspirations Crafts back in Likha ng Central Luzon 2015.

Now on to Santa Ignacia's kawayan.  This place, most especially the barrios, is actually littered with clumps of kawayan. Locals know where to get these, and there's widespread belief that rabong is easily pilfered by neighbors. LOL

The trouble with procuring kawayan for commercial use is that it's usually planted in ancestral lands of families, meaning it's shared property.  You wouldn't know who to pay upon purchasing good ones.  A harvester told us that there are lands within the municipality that's really abundant with bamboo, and he couldn't harvest cause the land owners will probably just fight over the payment. This made it hard for us to find kawayan to use.

Eventually, we got a referral from one of our workers and we managed to get some good poles.  We purchased them for about 25 pesos for every 3 meters. It's about a hundred pesos for every pole, from base to tip.

From the Calipayan-San Jose road, it's a left turn onto a dirt road. The very same path we took on our way to Pikkan Falls a few years back.

Here are some photos on our way to order the kawayan:

It was a sunny morning.

We stopped by this area before a creek/pond.

Walked a bit.

Over the hills, and far away...

...Teletubbies come to play. LOLJK

Oh diba pang Teletubbies nga. Haha.

If only these kawayan were more accessible then processing them would be a whole lot easier. Oh if only.  Hopefully, they'll be easier to procure within the next few years.

Mayantoc at 100!

Mayantoc, Tarlac's Summer Capital, is celebrating its centennial year this 2017.

Original image posted at https://monaliza2929.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/mayantoc-kiti-calao-waterfalls-a-place-that-you-must-see/

Mayantoc's the neighboring municipality of Santa Ignacia, to the north. It's pretty famous among us for its resorts, sights and water forms. Unlike most places in the province, they're fortunate enough to have a year-round supply of water, good for planting rice the whole year.

Ate Melai tells me it's home to one of only three twin falls in the Philippines. Now that's something.

The local government unit of Mayantoc is raising funds for their centennial celebration! You can help by purchasing these pretty little memorabilia available at their municipal hall:

A refrigerator magnet.

Clockwise, from top left: a refrigerator magnet, bamboo fans, key chains of varying shapes.

With all the festivities this 2017, it's probably the best year to drop by and experience Mayantoc.

Cultural Decay 001

I'm currently enamored by Philippine indigenous textile patterns. Rendering patterns common in Southern cultures, namely Yakan and T'boli and thought that these would make lovely elements.  So I made a piece:

Add caption

Colors are intentionally made in variants of Philippine flag colors. Don't ask why.

The Beef with Tarlac Is That It's Too Hot for Bulalo.

Being in Central Luzon has its perks.

You get exposed to at least three cultures.  Ilocano, Kapampangan and Tagalog. With these, their cuisines.

Ilocanos are known for cooking awesome vegetables. Pakbet Ilocano. Nobody needs to say more than that.  Meats are awesome too with bagnet, and we have the local incarnation of that little piece of heaven (go cholesterol! lol) with chicharron Camiling.

Kapampangans are the cuisine lords of Luzon. It's a generally established fact. Sisig please! Plus the Kapampangan version of dinuguan is my personal favorite.

There's also the usual adobo, and many chevon dishes. Rice cakes. Ugh. Food in Tarlac is awesome, really. But all that's really not the point of this post.

The beef with Tarlac, however, is that it's a bit too hot for bulalo. Oh bulalo. Beef, the king of meats, in its purest Filipino cuisinal incarnation is hard to appreciate in Tarlac.  When you say bulalo of course, you go to either Baguio or Tagaytay. However, let me be a bit hipster here and say that those places could be too mainstream. Lol kidding. The pleasure of eating bulalo in Baguio or Tagaytay of course comes with the mountainous climate.

The point of this post? I just had the best bulalo I've had in my entire 26 years of existence. And it's in a very nondescript place in Tarlac. Just outside Triple 888 Coliseum, in Capas. BULALO. IN TARLAC. How?!

Left: Google Maps screenshot of where to find that bulalo. Right: Google Street View of the closest landmark, Triple 888 Coliseum.

I can imagine having the dish with my beer, or after my beer. Or in the monsoon weather. Or right about January when the wind isn't so warm, which includes now so...

Shantal's Eatery as shown in Google Street View. 

The place is called Shantal's Eatery. It's really not your Instagram-worthy hipster kind of setup with the wire-mesh and naked concrete exteriors, Monobloc chairs and plastic Coca-cola tables (for the record, hipster now is mainstream, so what's the point? lol)... but the bulalo is just divine.  We had a meal in Shantal's. 2 large bowls of bulalo, a serving of bistek, 5 cups of rice and a bottle of C2 Litro. All that for 220. TWO HUNDRED TWENTY LANG *#@!%%(!!!!

Not your ordinary bulalo in a very ordinary presentation.

Now on to the bulalo! Putting the flesh apart was like separating strands of corned beef. It was that soft! Despite that, it didn't have the mushy quality you get from really bad canned corned beef. The taste was also perfectly balanced. It wasn't too salty, and wasn't too rich but had the right umami. Sebo pretty much was nonexistent. I remember getting greasy lips applying chap stick but this bulalo did not give me one bit of that icky feeling anywhere in my mouth. There's about two wombok leaves tossed in there too, not that it matters but hey, it's something!

So if I'm gonna act like a food blogger, might as well have 100% internalization and on to the scores!

Taste: 9/10

Texture: 9/10

Presentation: Kusina ni lola/10

Surprise factor: 10/10

January Hustle

Started my first few days of January productive with some projects.

A montage of my first 10 days of 2017. Yes that's a self portrait just because. :P

Cheers to a productive 2017!

(Another) First Post!

I've got nothing better to call my blog. I've got no fancy first words either.

I'll start by making this a bit about myself. I write to satisfy myself anyway. :)

I'm a Tarlaqueño. I was born in Tarlac City, and was raised in Santa Ignacia, Tarlac. I speak Tagalog casually, with the occasional Ilocano and English too. Like I say with much humor in some of my Facebook posts, "Iloconyo."

I graduated form Tarlac Montessori School, had my freshman year of college in the University of the Philippines Baguio and finished the rest of my course in the University of the Philippines Diliman.

I freelanced in Makati, Metro Manila for about a year from graduating, doing illustrations and graphics for some ad agencies.  Eventually, I got fed up with the Manila lifestyle and went home. Tarlac, as expected, was a different ballgame altogether.

I worked under the Department of Trade and Industry's Local Designer's Program. Under the said program, I learned about product design, more of entrepreneurship, and was asked by the Provincial Director to study a medium with which I'll specialize. Bamboo was the in thing. I read up a lot of materials, on processing bamboo and similar media.  Besides personal research, we from the Program were given the privilege of undergoing training workshops on business development and design.

I'm currently with the family business.  The scope of my work includes design, costing, pricing and finding the right market for products we manufacture.  With it, I still freelance making packaging labels, corporate identity and branding materials, illustrations. Occasionally, I get invited to speak and share what I know about handicrafts, bamboo, wood, marketing, packaging and labeling and some other stuff.  I also got elected as vice chairman of a cooperative of entrepreneurs based in the province. It all sounds fancy, but really... It's just wanting things and getting things done one way or another.

I'm not a very systematic person. I think. Hahaha. I plan a lot, but in executing these plans I'm quite sloppy. I blame it on my inexperience.  This blog is another one of those spur-of-the-moment good ideas I get, though I'd come rushing unprepared not knowing what to put here, hence this introduction.

In this blog I'll post plenty of items. Maybe some thoughts on everyday normal things like the weather, politics, product features, food, drawings & designs of course. Maybe a bit about my current projects. Whatever feels right.  I've tried blogging before and writer's block is quite strong.  I ended up wanting to write stuff about design and it all just stopped cause I didn't know what to write about. Haha. Oh, and for the sake of saying this is a regular thing, I'll be updating at least once a week.

This isn't my first attempt at blogging so... whatever. lol